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The Huffington Post
Romney Fires One Teen-Abuse Linked
Financier, Keeps Big One
September 6, 2007
By Maia Szalavitz
More
Romney / Lichfield news ...
Radar has the news that Mitt Romney
has kicked troubled-teen titan Robert Lichfield to the curb.
Lichfield's organization, the World Wide Association of Specialty
Schools and Programs (WWASPS, previously WWASP), is being sued in a
class action suit by over 100 plaintiffs, alleging serious sexual,
emotional and physical abuse. In the worst cases, teens were beaten,
kept in stress positions, sleep deprived, made to walk thousands of
laps on a hot desert track, forced to eat their own vomit and held
in dog cages. Mexican police shot footage of the dog cages and the
track, which was aired on Inside Edition.
Email Print Comment Another lawsuit
alleges educational fraud by one facility-- that facility was
already made to pay parents back over $1 million for falsely
claiming to provide legitimate New York state high school diplomas,
in one of the largest educational fraud judgments in New York
history.
Lichfield was Romney's Utah
co-chair for finance-- and he has been relieved of that position
"until the lawsuit is resolved in the positive, which we are
confident will happen," WWASPS spokesperson Ken Kay told Radar. This
is the same Ken Kay who said under oath in another civil suit that
he did not know whether sex between staff and teens in WWASPS
programs was necessarily abusive.
But Romney's national finance
co-chair, Mel Sembler, remains. While Sembler has not been linked
with any abuse personally, the organization he co-founded, Straight
Inc., paid out millions of dollars in similar suits during the
1980's and 1990's. The abuse included kidnapping, false
imprisonment, beatings, sexual humiliation (boys were called "fags,"
girls, "whores"), punitive use of isolation and restraint and
bizarre incidents like teens being gagged with Kotex and held on the
floor for hours until they wet or even soiled themselves. In every
state where Straight had a facility, regulators and/or lawsuits
eventually documented serious abuse.
The treatment regime itself is
essentially abusive-- it was virtually identical to a program in
which Sembler was a participant that a Congressional investigation
compared to North Korean brainwashing. (That investigation prompted
the founding of Straight as the prior group had been so discredited
by the report and resulting bad publicity).
And in Florida, home to both
Sembler and the first Straight site, when Straight finally folded in
1993 after nearly two decades of documented abuse cases, lawsuits
and investigations, one final investigation suggested that political
influence had kept regulators from shutting it down sooner. At the
time, Sembler was serving as a U.S. Ambassador. The Florida
Inspector General's report said, "there were indications that
outside influence was involved with this licensing issue. It appears
that pressure may have been generated by Ambassador Sembler ."
Of course, Lichfield has only
raised hundreds of thousands for Romney; Sembler, who was national
finance chair for the Republican party for the 2000 election season,
can raise many millions.
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